Apocalypse when?

Having conquered the mobile phone market in the Caribbean, Denis OBrien is now planning an American offensive, reports Mark Paul

It is not the sort of thing you could ever imagine Denis O’Brien doing: descending nude from a giant crane into New York’s Times Square astride a massive mobile phone, with just a strategically placed handset preserving his modesty. But that is just what Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin empire, did to herald the arrival of Virgin Mobile USA in 2002.

The crowd loved it, the company boss made the headlines, and just four years later Virgin has more than 4m customers in America.

Branson’s operation, which lit a fuse beneath the lacklustre pre-paid mobile phone market there, is now just one of a posse of incumbents awaiting the arrival of O’Brien’s Caribbean-based outfit Digicel, which plans to attack the near $100 billion (€78 billion) US mobile market next year.

While Branson arrived preaching love, however, O’Brien is already talking war. “I’ve launched a Tet Offensive,” he told Time